Tag Archives: meta

I took the summer off teaching in order to accompany my husband on a seven-week business trip. It’s good to be home again!

Today I officially went to graduate school orientation. I’ve already taken one class as a non-degree student, and now I’m continuing part-time as a degree-seeking student. Masters in TESOL, here I come! Slowly but surely, of course.

I start teaching again September 12th. I’ll be teaching Level 3 this time. Can’t wait!

It was a good class. There were 18 students, even though it was a freezing cold (for Maryland) Monday! We did lots of varied practice around the same grammar point, including writing, talking, and filling in blanks. I was pleased with my planning and execution, and I feel good about my direction for the rest of the week.

I’ve had some ongoing frustrations with my campus email, but today I had a real problem: I got a gmail note from one of my colleagues that her messages to my work email were bouncing back. I cleared out the few offending medium-large (they were by no means huge) messages that I’d received late last week and into the weekend. Since gmail doesn’t have that kind of a bounce-back problem, I decided I’d quick set up email forwarding to run my campus mail through gmail instead. The system said to call tech support to do so. When I called tech support, they said it was impossible.

I don’t believe that forwarding email is actually impossible, so I’m spending today’s post-class time working around the restrictive email system (I’ve got several ideas for at least partial solutions, and am testing one right now). I normally use this time for my lesson reflection, planning, and prep. I guess all of that will have to come later on in the evening sometime.

When I have prohibitively dull tools, I have to stop my real work to sharpen them.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I spend my time because there just never seems to be enough of it. Although I enjoy writing on this little blog, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to put energy into other projects for a while.

Thank you so much for reading, and for your comments (especially MJ, my star commenter). There’s a good chance I’ll be back at some point.